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This essay explores the rise of Protestant Christianity at the contemporary stage of China&rsquo ; s globalization as a unique social and cultural phenomenon. Globalization can be seen as not only a homogenization process in political and economic terms, but also a process in which religious ideas and moral principles spread around the world. While in an earlier phase of globalization lack of Christianity was once constructed as a moral argument to ban Chinese migration to the Christian West, in the current context of China&rsquo ; s aggressive business outreach and mass emigration Christianity has become a vital social force and moral resource in binding Chinese merchants and traders in diaspora. By linking the rise of a sinicized version of Christianity in secular Europe with China&rsquo ; s present-day business globalization, I hope to suggest a new transnational framework for studying Chinese Christianity, which has often been examined in the nation-based political context of church-state relations, and for rethinking it beyond the static, decontextualized system of world religions.

AbstractThis article sheds new light on the diverse modes in which migration and religion intersect in shaping everyday transnational practices by exploring the articulations of religion and business migration in an emerging Chinese‐led transnational mission field. Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Wenzhou, Rome and Paris, I show how a large group of transnational Chinese merchants has adopted a vigorous homegrown evangelical Christianity as the spiritual and social anchor of their territorial mercantile culture in diaspora. These merchants have actively engaged in producing religious activities and events that link China to Europe and in resacralizing secular real estate and attaching evangelistic meanings to Europe's historic urban spaces. For rural‐originated migrants who embrace a global hierarchy of places, the evangelical discursive distinction between the mundane and the transcendent spheres finds expression in their perceived opposition between the peripheral local and the modern global centre in the global market economy.

The paper addresses the changing dynamics of Protestantism in contemporary urban China through the lens of the Christian discourse of quality (suzhi). Linking suzhi with processes of identity and subject formation in the Chinese Protestant community, the paper shows that the religiosity of today's Chinese Protestants is not so much related to acts of spiritual seeking in a state-centred political framework as it is shaped by desires and practices of self-making among neoliberal individuals under rapid marketisation. It also demonstrates that Chinese Protestantism has undergone not just a quantitative increase but also a qualitative change that counters the one-dimensional representation of Christian religiosity in the post-Mao era. (China Perspectives/GIGA)

Since the 1990s Wenzhou has gained fame as a regional center of global capitalism and as China's Jerusalem, a center for Chinese Christianity. A new entrepreneurial class of Christians, known as boss Christians, has emerged and spearheaded local church development. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the intimate cultural linkage between the entrepreneurial outlook of the boss Christians and local church development. Wenzhou Christian entrepreneurial logic results in the capitalist consumerist production of church development and enables the refashioning of Chinese Christianity, a marginalized rural social institution in the popular imagination, into a modern urban institution. At the same time this upwardly mobile class of believers refashions their class identities, from village entrepreneurs with limited education to highly cultivated Christian leaders. Thus they convert economic resources into cultural capital. The cultural phenomenon of boss Christians provides a lens for understanding the desires, choices and actions of China's new rich and sheds light on the formation of a new local elite in reform-era urban China. (China J/GIGA)